The best navigational tools in the world are useless if you don’t know where you want to go.
This seems obvious, but only because we assume we wouldn’t be interested in navigational tools unless there was somewhere we wanted to go. But there’s an enormous difference between not wanting to be where we are now and knowing where we want to be instead.
On the way to creating and developing Farther to Go! I focused first on information about how the brain and mind actually function, which involved debunking quite a bit of conventional wisdom. Then I attempted to incorporate effective tools that had a proven track record and were based on what is now understood and widely accepted about the brain and the mind.
It didn’t take long before I recognized that something significant was missing. I could offer the most accurate information available—and all the tools in the world—but not only wasn’t that enough, in some cases it generated even more frustration.
The Answer to Every Question Is …
… a juicy desired outcome. I say it all the time now, and it was true back then, too, even though I may not have had the language for it.
Since the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is focused on maintaining the status quo, you could say it’s allergic to change. So our path of least resistance is to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. Information can tell us why that’s the case, and tools can describe what to do to get a different outcome, but in order to benefit from the information and the tools, we have to identify the outcome we want.
In general, we don’t know what we want. We don’t even know how to ask the question. So instead of pursuing juicy desired outcomes, we do something else.
- We pursue objectives. If we don’t know what we want, meeting our objectives or achieving our goals may or may not prove satisfying. An objective might lead to a juicy desired outcome, but it could as easily lead to disappointment and deflation.
- We attempt to fix what we perceive to be wrong with ourselves or our situations. Fixing isn’t compelling or motivating (to us or to the unconscious part of our brain), and it doesn’t produce creative tension or a sense of urgency. Fix-me attempts are more likely to result in failure than in success. Repeated failures to fix ourselves lead to a decreased sense of personal agency and reinforce the belief that there’s something wrong with us.
- We take precipitous, sometimes ill-considered, action to escape from our current circumstances—moving away from what we don’t want rather than toward what we want. But away-from-here is not a destination.
It’s the nature of the unconscious part of the brain to strive to maintain the status quo. But it’s the nature of the conscious part of the brain to imagine what-if? scenarios—to see possibilities, to aspire, to create, to innovate, and to take action to move forward. In order to move forward into a consistently satisfying and meaningful life, we have to determine what that is for ourselves.
The brain is a wanting machine. That’s true for everyone. But we have to determine where we want to go, who we want to be, and what we want to have. The first line of the Farther to Go! manifesto, developed in 2014, is:
Identify what you really want. And then create it.
That’s juicy. That’s the art in the art and science of change. It’s what we get to decide and must decide.
It turns out the art can be harder to master than the science.
*Philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796)